After a quick wash-up, Yuuga changed into comfortable off-white pajamas, then washed his dirty clothes and hung them out.
He didn’t hurry to bed.
Instead he sat down at the desk in his room and took out a notebook and a pen.
He tapped the end of the pen against his chin and sank into thought.
There were plenty of works about women he could use.
He thought for a moment, opened the notebook, and started writing down the names of a few of them.
My Lucky Star, Descendants of the Sun, Fantasies Behind the Pearly Curtain, Tokyo Love Story, L-DK…
Over and over, until close to a few dozen titles had appeared on the page, television dramas that had been huge hits in China, Japan and Korea.
Yuuga set down the pen, looked over the names he had written, and started thinking.
His index finger tapped lightly on the desktop, crisp in the silence of the night, the desk lamp on as if working alongside him.
The Chinese and Korean dramas could be adapted, but it would be difficult.
Once he got used to the formula he could handle them more easily.
For a debut, it was better to be careful and play it safe.
With that, Yuuga crossed My Lucky Star, Descendants of the Sun and the other Chinese and Korean titles off the page, a thin black line, drawn without hesitation.
That left four Japanese dramas.
Tokyo Love Story, L-DK, Majo no Joken, Pure Love Campus.
Put that way, the choice wasn’t hard.
Yuuga’s pen tip tapped twice on the words Tokyo Love Story, and as if he had settled something major, he said with some excitement, “OK, I choose you!”
Yuuga knew Tokyo Love Story well.
Back then he had watched the whole thing, every episode.
He still remembered one comment scrolling across the screen during the final episode: “A girl’s heart that throws caution to the wind is doomed to lose.”
But Rika’s imperfect ending was the thing that gripped a beating heart hardest.
A girl who chased love bravely, and who could face her whole life with a gentle smile even in defeat.
Tokyo Love Story was one of the most classic Japanese dramas, a godfather-tier work of the genre, the second part of the “20th century pure love trilogy,” and its reputation as the forefather of romance wasn’t empty.
The frenzy it set off across Asia was hard to put into words, and even the other members of the pure love trilogy, Suteki na Kataomoi and The 101st Proposal, couldn’t come close.
It was adapted from Fumi Saimon’s manga of the same name, a realistic love story about men and women in the city.
It already had a solid base of manga fans, Fumi Saimon wrote the script herself, and the director cast it well, so the moment the drama aired in Japan it struck a deep chord, and word of mouth was excellent.
The drama swept Japan and set the peak ratings record for a Japanese television drama at the time.
Other dramas and variety shows in the same slot were left far behind.
Later it also broke out of Japan and started exporting its culture to the world.
A work that good would do just fine as a debut.
And once this book came out, Yuuga was confident it could put up good numbers.
Because it had something to talk about: Rika.
Rika was an extremely likeable character.
She had everything men look for in a wife: gracious, intelligent, gentle and well-mannered, and able to step back and sacrifice when it counted.
At the same time she carried the mark of the modern woman’s freedom, and a single “I love you” laid bare the girl’s courage, her toughness, even her refusal to bend.
With a “complicated” woman like that brought to life in front of the public, he guessed it wouldn’t be only the women’s market.
Some men would read it too.
Thinking about thousands of women taking his work as their after-dinner conversation piece got Yuuga a little worked up.
He had already daydreamed up the title.
Keep it blunt and simple: Konoha Love Story.
Simple, blunt, and close to daily life.
“I’m a damn genius,” he said.
Excitement aside, business was business, and the cheering would have to wait until the book was out.
Yuuga thought for a bit, then picked up the pen and began laying out the plot of Tokyo Love Story from memory, piece by piece.
Broadly, it was a story of a love polygon in which the heroine, the angel Rika, gloriously gets knocked out while everyone else pairs off.
First, the workplace of the leads had to change.
In the original several of them were employees at a branch of a sporting goods store, but in the ninja world war was the main theme, and peaceful athletic activities were nowhere to be found.
Yuuga decided on the spot and turned the sporting goods branch into a ninja tool shop, the kind common in the village.
As for the male lead, Kanji Nagao, Yuuga couldn’t say he liked him much, but he didn’t dislike him either.
He did abandon the gentle, lovable angel Rika, but he was following his heart back to his first love.
Yuuga didn’t go out of his way to make the character ugly, just changed him into a simple young man who came from a small country town in the Land of Fire to work at the Konoha ninja tool shop.
When it came to the heroine, Rika Akana, Yuuga wrote down the name and paused, tapping the pen shaft lightly against his forehead twice.
Rika was the heart of the whole work, and she couldn’t be handled carelessly.
After thinking for a good while, Yuuga decided to change Rika’s background to a family of merchants, a girl who had drifted around the world with the adults since childhood and had now settled in Konoha as a veteran employee at the ninja tool shop, gentle as water.
People who traveled and traded tended to have a bit of sharpness and nerve, which lined up with the traits in Rika’s personality.
Yuuga nodded, satisfied, and moved on to the other character profiles.
Natsuki Waga had the mature appeal of a middle-aged man, perceptive and easygoing, and a character like that was perfect as the manager of the ninja tool shop branch.
As for Satomi Sekiguchi, she came from the same place as Kanji.
A neat freak, insecure, passive and negative, with a powerful maternal streak, a textbook old-fashioned “homemaker” type.
In the original she worked at a kindergarten, so she would teach at the Konoha kindergarten, from a fairly well-off family that had once run an adult entertainment business.
Yuuga stopped writing and clicked his tongue.
He shook his head.
Whichever way you looked at it, Satomi Sekiguchi really was not a likeable character, so selfish.
Compared to her, Rika was a goddess, no question.
Naoko Nagasaki became a well-bred young lady from one of Konoha’s great families, working at Konoha Hospital.
Kenichi Mikami became a young man who came to Konoha to study medicine, unrestrained in temperament, even something of a womanizer.
…
Working from memory, Yuuga not only converted all the character profiles from Tokyo Love Story into the characters of Konoha Love Story, he fleshed some of them out.
On top of that, he finished the outline and wrote an opening.
Only when he saw how late it was did he get up and go to bed.